NEW ZEALANDER TAKES A LOOK AT GAY PAREE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 100, 27 September 1948, Page 4

NEW ZEALANDER TAKES A LOOK AT GAY PAREE

Their Friends , The Wine , The Dancing (By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) Paris, August 14. Ah, Paris. Ah, the boulevards. Ah, the food and the wine. Ouch, the prices ! / Sipping away at a chic open air cafe on. the famous and beautiful Champs Elysees I picked an immediate likeness to Wellinton’s famous and beautiful Willis Street. Rain was pelting down. Here is about the only resemblance I have found in Paris to anything in New Zealand, save that the view from my hotel window recalls the light well of any New Zealand hotel you care to name. At cafes here you may dally for hours over lunch, wine and replete reveries. This makes for a more tranquil flow of the vital digestive juices than the New Zealand system of polishing off the last mouthful on the march to the cash desk while the waitress herds her next victim into position behind your debris of dishes. The French way is, of course, grievously irresponsible in that there is no great likelihood of anyone getting- back from lunch in time to close the office for the night. A further cause of the amiable chaos which pervades this land is the stubborn refusal of the natives to assimilate instructions given in clear English. There is a pronounced tendency for waiters to speak French, and ■ a mispronounced tenency. for customers to try. A gentleman along the Boulevard Saint Germain early the other morning lent respectful attention to my verbal and semaphored inquiries as to “Oust the Club Antillais? You know, un espece de cabaret joint. Comprenez?”

Having mulled over the matter a thoughtful while, he elected to come at the. whole perplexing proposition from another angle. “Do you speak English?” he asked. Left Band night spots are an agreeable cross between a bog hop and a football club smoko, shoved into a back room and garnished with bar and saxophone. They do not depend on foreign tourists, who mostly take their money to Montmartre. Parisians are fond of their friends,' their wine and their dancing. I cannot swear that they would bubble ecstatically over a New Zealand evening mooching round the back garden watching the cabbages ,at play. As the ground has been amply covered elsewhere I shall. not run to any length on the artistic treasures of the Louvre, where I arrived ten minutes after it closed for the night. Thus I made it in ample time for the floor show at the Tabarin, champagne and shimmer tourist spot where, the pin up girls are unpinned, and no Frenchman would be caught with his cash down.